A Story at the End of Every Road

June 5, 2018

These are stories, as are all stories, that are partly fact and partly fiction, partly truth and contradiction.

This has pretty much been the story of my life.

A lot of strange roads.

A lot of fascinating people.

A lot of odd stories.

I’ve traveled them. I’ve met them. I’ve heard them. And, for years, I had no idea what to do with them.

Finally, I packed the stories up and stuffed them in a book that describes what life is all about: Confessions from the Road. I’ve heard them everywhere I’ve gone, and I’d like for you to wander down the winding back roads that beckoned me.

I’d like for you to meet a curious array of folks, rich and poor, young and old, lost and found, that have made a difference in my life.

I’d like for you to hear the tales they have told me.

The stories in this collection are true. No. Let me re-phrase that. Confessions from the Road is a collection of short stories and essays that form a kind of memoir of my experiences as a newspaperman, a travel editor, and an author.

I know that some of these stories are indeed fact. I was there to experience them first-hand, and they reflect my own perspective on the events, told as accurately as I remember them.

Many of the stories were told to me as true by eyewitnesses, by people who talked to eyewitnesses, by those who heard second-hand eyewitness accounts repeated and edited and embellished over an early-morning gallon or two of coffee down at the corner café or a late-night gallon or two of hard whiskey at some corner beer joint.

The information behind some of the stories was gleaned by research, primarily from libraries and old, yellowed newspaper files. These were stories I had heard and knew long before Google ever got around to joining our existence.

I have long believed that life is fiction. We can’t believe that it actually happens, but it does. And memorable fiction is always driven by characters and conflict. So it is with life as well.

These are the stories of the common man and woman, who search for love, feel pain and heartache and grief, who have laughed and cried, sometimes over the same tragedy, whose own lives are filled with drama, whether they ever stop to acknowledge it or not, and who spend most of their lives chasing the ghosts of their memories.

As individuals, we are forever defined by our loves and our ghosts, what we knew happened, what we thought happened, what we wondered if it really ever happened at all.

These are stories, as are all stories, that are partly fact and partly fiction, partly truth and contradiction.

They live on because roadside storytellers once told them to me.

And I’m passing them on to you.

That’s how memories remain, and, as we look back, our lives are nothing more than memories patched together like the ancient pattern in some grandmother’s quilt.